Abstract

With the advancements in sequencing technologies, there is an exponential growth in the availability of the biological databases. Biological databases consist of information and knowledge collected from scientific experiments, published literature and statistical analysis of text, numerical, image and video data. These databases are widely spread across the globe and are being maintained by many organizations. A number of tools have been developed to retrieve the information from these databases. Most of these tools are available on web but are scattered. So, finding a relevant information is a very difficult, and tedious task for the researchers. Moreover, many of these databases use disparate storage formats but are linked to each other. So, an important issue concerning present biological resources is their availability and integration at single platform. This chapter provides an insight into existing biological resources with an aim to provide consolidated information at one place for ease of use and access by researchers, academicians and students.

Nature Of Biological Data

Current century is facing a big challenge to store, manage and retrieve the variety of biological data generated from numerous genome sequencing projects. These projects generate a variety of the data. Two important types of data are:

1.

Sequence: This is associated with the DNA of a tissue from various species and usually consists of strings containing set of DNA nucleotides bases namely Cytosine (C), Guanine (G), Adenine (A), or Thymine (T).

2.

Structure: This deals with the three-dimensional structure of biological macromolecules such as proteins, RNA, and DNA.

Broadly, a biological database is classified into sequence and structure databases. Sequence database consists of DNA and protein sequences whereas structure databases are related to proteins. Due to huge volume of this kind of data, their storage needs, connecting technique among their various types (e.g. sequences, structure information and so on) and requirement of a quick and easy retrieval system, there was a need to develop biological databases.